Menu Project: Capital Grille

The third project was designing a menu for a restaurant. I chose to do Capital Grille. It's a fancy, upscale restaurant with high prices, high expectations, and great food. The requirements were to create two spreads: the front - back - inside flap, and the inside spread; include the prices of each item; and to preferably create a logo.

Initially I wanted to work with neutral colors but decided to go with black and white since their staff wear black and white. I wanted to include stars in the menu somehow because they have a tradition: every 10 (or is it 5?) times the wait staff get a call/emailed/formal compliment they receive a gold star to pin on their shirt. Some of the waiters have been there for years and have over 6 star pins. I also wanted it to be clean and elegant. The Capital Grille prides itself on its vast variety of wines and their large stock of over 5,000 wines. I wanted to incorporate that into the menu somehow.

It was an OK project. I wish I spent more time on it to make the menu more unique, especially the inside spread. I did learn a lot about formatting, grids, and editing images (rotate, gradient makes a great reflection). And although it isn't much, I did re-create their logo. I wanted something more elegant than what they offered. This is what their current logo looks like:

I probably could have taken out the border on my logo? The formatting and the layout took up most of my time so I made only a slight change the second menu. The only difference between the two variations is one has the same bottle of wine on the front/back flap and the other one has a white wine bottle on the front flap with a red wine bottle on the back flap. Which one do you like better? Here are the results:

 The one with the different bottle colors:

Project: Typography

The second project was based on typography.  I had to design a layout or spread of copy (which happened to be about typography) in a creative way. Hierarchy was a must so I focused on that first by creating a simple layout. I liked the idea of using bold typeface and different sizes to create the hierarchy.  When I started to experiment with different ideas, I created a more complex layout to make it more interesting. I thought at first that having all the white space would help it, but I think I had too much. Eventually I wanted to use color, but only one color: green. Then I played around with pictures and using type as an image.

Overall I had a lot of fun with this project. It was a challenge to keep thinking of new ideas once I had one on the screen in front of me, but I essentially rearranged and added/subtracted things to make them different. I learned a lot of new technical features in InDesign like creating text on a shape and using the eye dropper tool to keep similar formatting. Here are the end results: suggestions?

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